This blog is about The Big Picture - information and insights about what goes on in the world outside our borders - and what it means for Americans. Unless otherwise specified, all photos from Deena Stryker archive.

Monday, August 17, 2009

Open Letter to the President: K.I.S. Sir!

Caution inspired an extremely complicated organizational chart, which your opponents show off at Town Hall meetings. Who wouldn't run from that? More bureaucracy means more money, and dividing up the responsibilities is never efficient.

In order to keep the elite happy, America bends over backwards to plug all sorts of gaps and lacks: we have volunteerism instead of a real safety net. Americans pay taxes just like people in the welfare states, but since their taxes don't go for social projects, they pay again with their time and effort.

The argument that you would have to to "raise taxes" should be answered with the following: Americans pay income tax and health care contributions via their employer. The problem is that the health care contributions go to maintain a for profit system. The same amounts would be paid if we had a single payer system, and the "taxes" part would not have to be any bigger than it is now, because it would be combined with the health care contributions which instead of funding profits would fund non-profit health care.

Of course, there's an elephant in the room, and that's our military engagements: you cannot permit

yourself to point out that if we hadn't decided to keep troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, discussions

about the cost of saving American lives would dissolve into thin air.

Speaking of Town Hall Meetings, I don't believe there were any when President Bush went to

war in 2001 and 2003, nor when you decided to pretty much continue his war policies.

What's the point of having public debates about health care when we don't have public debates

about going to war? For all the valor of the anti-war movement, everybody knows that once the horse is out of the barn it's too late to close the door.

By not designing health care reform as a single payer system, which is what all civilized countries have in one form or another, you're rapidly finding yourself in the same mess as the Clintons, which will force you, in order not to fail completely, as they did, to compromise away the public option which you thought could save the present system while taking care of the uninsured.

The single payer system is the only one that makes sense economically and socially. You gave the establishment what it wanted by continuing its war policies. If you don't stand up to it now by clearing the table of all the compromises being studiously worked on to save a dying social system, the beast will continue to suffer a long drawn out illness before collapsing of its own weight.

The simultaneous conflation of health care reform with fascism and communism is the result of our political and media class lumping them together as totalitarianism regimes. The fascist regimes didn't provide universal health care, the socialist regimes did. The American public's knowledge of social systems is abysmal and can no longer be ignored if you really want to bring change to America.

There have to be continuing town halls all over the country led by different people and different groups about the role of government in a democratic society, so that Americans can first of all acquire healthy brains.

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The alternative press is replete with despair and ‘hope’, neither of which is helpful. ‘Squawking’ may alleviate some of the pain Americans experience at being identified with a government that brutalizes Others at will, but it doesn’t change the ‘facts on the ground’. As for hope, it is an easy cop-out: in the present state of the world, we can never be certain that tomorrow will come. Whether a barefoot child in Africa or a hedge-fund manager, all of us are the potential victims of hubris.

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About Me

Born in Philadelphia, I studied in Paris, became a French citizen by marriage, debuted at Agence France Presse in Rome, then, as Deena Boyer, followed Fellini’s creative process for The Two Hundred Days of ’81/2’. The proceeds from this book enabled me travel to Cuba to to interview Fidel Castro for a major French weekly, meeting with him again a week after the Kennedy assassination and several times in 1964 for a book, Cuba 1964: When the Revolution was Young, in which the other members of the government (including Che Guevara, Raul Castro and Celia Sanchez), tell in their own words why they made the revolution. My Cuba archive is on-line at Duke University.

In the seventies, I did graduate work in Global Survival, taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and was a speech writer in the Carter State Department, publishing an article on U.S.-Soviet relations in the in-house journal in 1976.

Returning to Paris in 1981, with assistance from the Centre National du Livre, I published Une autre Europe, un autre Monde, the only book that foresaw the reunification of Europe and the breakup of the Soviet Union. I returned to Philadel-phia in 2000, and have been a contributor and senior editor at various on-line journals.

A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness hopes to change the way both seekers and skeptics look at good and evil - -and at the daunting problems of the 21st century. It shows that religious belief is not necessary to achieve serenity, but that awareness of the sacred as confirmed by modern science, is. It does this by viewing the world as a system and exploring what that means for the role of politics.

America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World is a primer for Americans and others who find the policies of successive US governments difficult to square with their image of the country and its founding documents. The decades I spent living on both sides of the Iron Curtain provided me with a unique awareness of America’s image abroad and of the mainstream media’s failure to convey news and ideas to the voters in whose name policies are carried out. References to work by other political writers illustrate little-known or forgotten features of American history that have contributed to the tragic face the country presents today.

Cuba 1964 provides the definitive answer to the question: “Was Fidel Castro a Communist before he carried out the revolution, or did he become one because of the way the United States reacted when he ousted pro-US dictator Fulgencio Batista? While following day by day events, I had extensive conversations with the men and women who had joined the Castro brothers as early as 1953 and were now members of the revolutionary government. Together with Fidel, Raul, Che and Celia Sanchez, they told me in their own words why and now they made the Revolution hat continues to inspire countries in Latin America and around the world. The text is illustrated with photographs from my black and white archive which can be seen on-line at Duke University.

Lunch with Fellini Dinner with Fidel: How did it happen that a fourteen year old American girl found herself living among the French in post-war Paris? The answer to that question also explains why I went on to live in half a dozen countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain, becoming mutti-lingual, writing first about the cinema, then about ‘the big picture’ while raising two children, mostly on my own. A religious grandmother and a hedonistic lover accompanied me on a journal which has been both spiritual and political, and is illustrated by many photographs from my personal album.